


i would like to reach out my hand

by redlightwarning



Category: Scorpion (TV 2014)
Genre: Alcohol, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Implied Sexual Content, Minor Violence, Poorly Researched Psychology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-18 02:20:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7295620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redlightwarning/pseuds/redlightwarning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an incident during a case leads to an uncomfortable psych evaluation</p>
            </blockquote>





	i would like to reach out my hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melodramaticfangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melodramaticfangirl/gifts).



> Based on the prompt: happy is required by homeland to undergo a psych evaluation after getting a bit too violent with a criminal - happy asks toby to do it because he is the only one she trusts, and he is a bit too excited about it.
> 
> this probably isn't what you were really asking for, but i hope you enjoy anyway, pal. 
> 
> im so sorry this is so late.
> 
> the title is from rusted root for no other reason than i love that song.
> 
> disclaimer: all of the psychological information in this is poorly researched, very basic, and also made up.

She’s been avoiding him all day when he finally catches up with her, the fridge door swinging shut to reveal six feet of careful manipulation and boyish exuberance. He has a clipboard with him and he’s wearing his hat at a ‘jaunty angle’ even though she keeps telling him that it makes him look like an ass. She tells herself she doesn’t like it.

“Do you have a few minutes to finish this psych eval or would you like to stretch it out into next week too? Wait ‘til everyone’s here and listening in?” He glances at his wrist as if checking the time, but he doesn’t wear a watch. “I’m very flexible,” he says, waggling his eyebrows ridiculously.

She swallows her half-chewed food and it presses uncomfortably and drags in her throat. She’s not quick enough to stop him and he’s already speaking again.

“Please respond to the following statements with ‘true’ if you feel the statement describes you, and ‘false’ if you feel it does not.” He clears his throat and clicks his pen. “Your sex life is very satisfactory.”

(She remembers this morning, and bruises bitten into skin and the rough drag of skin across her sensitized body. It’s true, she thinks. Her sex life is very satisfactory.)

“False,” is what she says, because he picked that question on purpose.

He makes a considering humming sound like he doesn’t believe her, and he circles something on his paper. “Number two, you get angry sometimes.”

Occasionally, when he’s wasting her time like this, she literally hates him. “Are you kidding me? You couldn’t have filled this in yourself?” She throws the rest of her sandwich in the bin and grabs an old dusty mug off the side and a near-empty bottle of bourbon from the cupboard under the sink that leaks, and pours herself a very healthy shot. Desperate times and all.

“Please, Miss Quinn,” he says, his voice the very suggestion of gravity and faux-concern. “This is a comprehensive evaluation of your personality traits and your suitability for employment in high-pressure environments. There is no ‘kidding’ here.”

She snorts, even though she feels like a naughty child all over again, with every sort of professional echoing assessments over and over again, drawn to her ‘concerning’ behaviour. She’d always been a difficult sort of smart and angry that had many a teacher ‘believing in her’ and then giving up on her entirely three weeks later when she was no longer the new kid. A perpetual cycle of ‘gifted’ and ‘disappointment’ until the words almost ran together. A gifted disappointment. Gifted at disappointing.

She throws the rest of her drink back without a wince and pours another finger or two before she drops into a chair at the table and kicks the other chair out for him. He sits. She sips. There is a pointed silence.

“Get on with it then,” she says, and he grins back at her, wide mouth and dark eyes and he looks like a shark. She finishes her drink and considers the bottle. “Number Three, you have previously used alcohol and-or drugs to help deal with unpleasant situations or emotions.”

“Can you stop enjoying this for five minutes?”

“Interesting. Why do you think I’m enjoying this?”

“You’re an ass.”

He hums again and jots a couple of words onto the forms attached to his clipboard and then he puts the pen and clipboard down on the table to lean forward against his hand. His eyes scan her face and she itches under the scrutiny. “You know, defensive responses often score quite highly for cynicism.” A pause. “Why do you think I’m enjoying this?”

She shrugs. “It’s hypomania, right Doc? Manipulative, deceptive, and with an ego to boot. Everything’s just a game to you.”

“Sometimes,” he concedes, “But I think it only sticks when you think I’m playing you. Neuroticism, that is. Low-self esteem and worst case scenarios. I’m right aren’t I?” He leans in a little closer until his chest is nearly touching the table and it pushes their hands closer together, and she’s hyper aware of every millimetre between them. If he splayed his fingers then she could touch him.

She wants him to.

Maybe then he would shut the hell up.

“I’m going to hit you if you don’t shut up.”

He laughs outright at that, a quick bark of laughter that echoes in the silence of the garage and grates at her ears. She raises an eyebrow because she's not joking. She'd love to hit his pretty little mouth right now, and the only reason that she doesn't is because he finally nudges their fingers together, not holding but touching all the same.

"You know, it's completely against every rule about professionalism for me to be doing this for you."

"I know."

"Then why me?"

She considers him for a moment, considers every action that put her right here in this chair in front of him. Maybe Cabe was right. She shouldn’t have asked him to do this – asked him to flay her open and rummage around to see what he could find – she doesn’t know what horrors he might find locked deep inside.

Somehow, the thought of somebody else doing it is worse.

She looks away from him to study the scorch marks on the table leftover from an experiment Walter insists was successful, and tries to unstick her tongue from the back of her throat.

“Better the devil,” she says, her mouth pitching and tripping over the syllables, and she hates herself for not being able to just say the words to him, but honesty has never been her forte.

“You trust me.” He’s goading her, she knows, but his voice still lilts a little in question.

“Sometimes. A little.”

There’s a filled pause that settles against her lungs, but then he’s taking his hat off and tossing it onto the counter and he pushes the clipboard to the side too, until it teeters on the edge of the table before lurching and falling to the floor with a loud clatter, and he gives her his full attention once more, his smile belying mischief at its edges. She feels her own lips twitch too, before the seriousness of the situation catches up with them both again.

“What happened, Happy?”

And well, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? One quick moment changed everything, and now there’s an open Homeland investigation, and nobody can quite look her in the eye, as if by not looking at her nobody has to acknowledge what she did. The garage is much quieter these days and she’s pretty sure it’s because she’s never spent so much time here alone, just waiting for something to change. Toby is supposed to be that change, but that means she has to talk to him. Let him evaluate her.

He doesn’t seem to understand just how much he terrifies her.

“I know you read the report. I did what was necessary.”

He just looks at her without wavering, and she breathes in deep until she can feel the stretch in her sides, and then she deflates, and lets it all out with a defeated whoosh.

“We got into his office, searched his files, and then he was there. He had a gun. I reacted.” Her words feel as unnatural to her as they did the first time she said them, and the second, and the third. They feel like a foreign hand snatching that gun and pulling the trigger, and as wrong as everything has felt since that day.

She shrugs again because there’s nothing else to say, no matter how often she has to go over the memories. She did what she had to do to save the kids he’d abducted, and now she just needs everybody to stop looking at her like she’s breaking apart when she’s really, really not.

“I’m fine, Doc,” she says, and she’s tired of having to tell everyone that, and he smiles like he can hear her bored exasperation.

He can probably hear everything she’s feeling.

Stupid shrink.

“You know they’re just worried about you - especially Walter.” He rolls his eyes and spends a moment muttering about emotional constipation before he catches himself, and he drums his fingers against the table before he’s touching her again, turning her hand over to trace light patterns against her palm. She blinks, her eyelids heavy and heart lurching up into her throat. “They’re subconsciously waiting for you to grieve so they can decide how to behave around you.”

She swallows and looks away from his earnest eyes and open expression, and her chest feels hot and tight and sore. “He didn’t die.”

The man - Roberts - is in the ICU being pumped full of sedatives and painkillers whilst he recovers from his first of three planned surgeries. He will eventually make a full recovery.

She kind of wishes he wouldn’t, and that wasn’t a scary thought until everybody started telling her that she should feel sad or guilty or scared, and now she can’t stop thinking about how messed up everything is.

“It’s a different sort of grief,” he says, his thumbs sweeping arcs across her pulse. “Loss of innocence, nothing will ever be the same, somebody was hurt, et cetera.” He rolls his eyes like the sentiment is too ridiculous to take seriously, but it doesn’t ease her violent shame at not being able to feel that.

She can’t even manage to act like a normal human being for five short minutes, and the realization is devastating to her.

Her chair screeches across the floor when she jerks to her feet, and she refuses to look at him even when he jumps a little in surprise. “He abducted three children,” she spits, her voice rough to even her own ears. “So don’t waste your doctoring, because I’ve never felt better.”

And then she flees before he can respond.

 

~

 

She spends the next two days hiding under her welding mask, and slinking out of the garage as soon as the clock hits five. Paige tries to talk to her a couple of times and Toby tries his best to fill her voicemail with messages, but she ignores them both, and can only really stand Cabe’s company because he considers himself somewhat above interfering in their lives and makes no secret of the fact that he’s responsible for their safety not their feelings.

(She suspects that he’s only allowing her to follow him around because of his own guilt at being unable to protect her from Roberts in the first place, but he doesn’t bring it up and she doesn’t remember ever being so grateful.)

On the third day of her self-imposed isolation, Cabe hangs back at the garage as the others take off to meet a corporate client.

“Looks like you’re back on the team, kid.” He drops a file on her desk and she looks up at him in surprise.

“That’s it?”

She feels like that’s too easy an answer. She shot someone and everyone figured out how messed up she is, and she’s been awaiting a damning report from Toby, sure that he’s only been calling her instead of walking the twenty metres separating their desks because he feels bad about what he’s had to write for her evaluation.

“Unless you want me to roll out the red carpet for you first,” Cabe quips as he smirks down at her, before his face softens into a smile. “Doc said you did good.”

And then he’s walking away, and her attention is drawn back to the file left sitting innocently on her desk.

She steels herself and counts to five before she reaches for it, just to prove that she can, and then flips straight to the last page of the report and begins to read.

 

 

 

 

> _Following the incident in question, Ms. Quinn has become somewhat withdrawn, which can be considered an appropriate reaction to trauma. During our conversations, it became clear that Ms. Quinn has struggled to mediate the conflicting nature of her feelings - her empathy for Mr Roberts’ victims supersedes her empathy for Mr Roberts himself, and although she did not wish harm to befall him, she has experienced anxiety due to her lack of compassion for the injuries he sustained. Again, such confusion is often to be expected, and underlines Ms. Quinn’s innate emotional sensitivity._
> 
> _Furthermore, this sensitivity concludes that although the actions necessitated of her were unfortunate, they were wholeheartedly inspired by her desire to assist the victims, and to protect Mr Dodd from harm, with whom she shares a particularly close and affectionate bond. Her actions demonstrate her good judgement and clarity during times of extreme stress._
> 
> _For these reasons, I believe that Ms. Quinn is fit to return to work immediately. She is a valuable asset to Team Scorpion due to her intellectual ability, emotional depth, and professional conduct._

 

 

She stares at the page for a long time feeling weighted, and warm, and sleepy, but as her body buzzes with anticipation, her mind is silent but for one sentiment.

_Oh._

The garage remains still for a long time as she reads the words over and over, tucking each word carefully into her heart to be called upon at a later date, and she can't quite bite back a smile.

 

~

 

She had wanted to talk to him when he returned to the garage, but it had been too loud and busy, with everyone excited after completing another job, and so she had sat still and quiet at her desk as the words he’d written about her had continued to rub her raw in the very best of ways.

(The wait was agonizing, and her shoulders had stiffened with the effort it took her not to turn and seek his gaze with her own.)

Slowly, everyone had drifted in their separate directions, until it was just the two of them downstairs, and she could finally look at him, move towards him, and make sense of the tangle of feelings in her chest.

She finds him in the kitchen rooting through the cupboards, and she loves him.

When he turns around and notices her, every half-formed thought evaporates in an instant and her stomach flutters uncomfortably at his open expression.

She wants to thank him, and tell him off, and interrogate him all at once, and he unravels all the peace he brought to her when he frowns at her silence, and asks if she’s ok.

She’s good, and bad, and irritated, and happy, and confused, and so she steps into his space and pulls him down by the material of his jacket, and she takes a second to memorize the shape of his brow and the line of his nose before she kisses him.

His mouth is soft and warm and he yields to her as quickly as he always does, despite the way she’s been ignoring him for days, and she pushes closer and breathes him in.

When they finally separate, both breathless and flushed, she twines their pinky fingers together and basks in the warmth of the grin he shoots her.

“Good day?” He asks, sounding more than a little bewildered.

“Passed my psych eval,” she murmurs. “Back to work now.”

He leans in closer and trails sweet kisses against her jaw. “Getting tired of pulling your weight for you,” he quips, and she only elbows him a little for it, just enough to hear him groan.

“Thank you,” she says, and she means for believing in her, and for seeing something worthwhile, and for what he willingly went on record to say about her. She hopes he hears it all in her voice.

“Thank me later,” he says before he’s kissing her again, a little hotter, and a little more demanding, his hand at her waist and pulling her closer and -

Yeah, gratitude can wait.


End file.
